


Death, Faith, and the Doctor

by engagemythrusters



Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-03-08 06:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18889471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/engagemythrusters/pseuds/engagemythrusters
Summary: Jack says he doesn't believe in anything, but Ianto begins to suspect that's not true.





	Death, Faith, and the Doctor

When Ianto first asked Jack about religion, he wasn’t sure how to interpret the answer he was given.

The topic had come up one rainy night, far into the wee hours of the morning. Jack had woken from another nightmare, and Ianto knew neither of them were going to get more sleep any time soon. Ianto still didn’t know what had happened those months Jack was away, because Jack kept pushing the conversation off until later. Ianto didn’t know when ‘later’ would be, and Jack had already had a month, but they were slowly getting there.

At the moment, Jack was drawing lazy circles over Ianto’s back, apparently mesmerized by the skin under his fingertips. Ianto turned over, because Jack’s fingers had reached a particularly ticklish spot on his spine. Jack, unfazed by this, didn’t stop drawing. He kept his fingers tenderly brushing over Ianto’s chest, painting a picture only he could see. Ianto intently watched Jack’s face, and the sheer look of almost reverence on Jack’s face made him blink for a few moments before deciding that it was merely a trick of the weak streetlights outside.

After a while, Ianto found himself drifting off a bit under the feel of Jack’s gentle doodling, before forcing himself back awake.

“You should sleep,” Jack whispered to him.

Ianto made a faint grunting noise. After Jack had come back, after the nightmares had become apparent, Ianto made sure he was the last to fall asleep, just so Jack didn’t feel alone. Based on the way Jack tended to cling tightly to him following a nightmare, Ianto suspected most of the nightmares were filled with loneliness or something similar.

“Are you writing on me now?” Ianto murmured as he felt a shape that was uncannily like a ‘J’ being traced onto him.

“Have been for a while,” Jack said, somewhat sheepishly. “All the alphabets I know.”

“And how many is that?”

There was a silence as Jack tallied them up in his head. Eventually, Ianto felt him shrug. “Lost count.”

“Is it helping?”

Jack shrugged again. “I don’t know. But you are.”

“Mmm. What do you do when I’m not there?”

It wasn’t that he was prying, he was just curious. Ianto himself was often plagued by his internal demons, and the most soothing thing he could come up with was watching Jack snore like a hippopotamus on the nights they spent together. On the nights they didn’t, he just… dealt.

“Wake up.”

Ianto rolled his eyes, even though Jack probably couldn’t see that in the dim light. “I meant after. What do you do? Recite the alphabets out loud? Pushups? Pray?”

“None of those. Alphabets are no fun alone. Don’t need pushups. And I don’t pray.”

“No religion in the fifty first century?”

“There is, but not exactly… well, just not what you’d expect,” Jack said. “And I don’t believe in any of them.”

“No God or Allah or Brahman for you?”

“Nope,” Jack said, softly popping the ‘P’ as he moved onto the Cyrillic alphabet.

 “Why not?”

Jack stopped halfway through a large ‘д’ to think about that. “There’s not a god big enough to deal with what I’ve got.”

Ianto could have sworn he heard a muttered “apparently.”

None of that made any sense to Ianto, but to keep the dialogue going, he said: “Oh.”

Jack quickly moved onward. “What about you? Any prostrating on knees in the name of all things holy for Ianto Jones?”

Ianto was tired, but not tired enough to ignore the opportunity for innuendo. “Only for you, sir.”

Jack snickered quietly and pressed a kiss to his nose. Ianto scrunched his face up in response, and Jack breathed another laugh.

“Seriously, though,” Jack said, sobering.

“Not really,” Ianto said uncomfortably. They were moving into Backstory Territory, and that was never a fun route for either of them.

“Oh?” Jack urged.

Ianto sighed. “Mum was only bit religious. Went to church for Easter and Christmas. Maybe once or twice a year otherwise. Then she stopped bothering with it and that was that. But even if that did form a warped set of beliefs in twelve-year-old me, there’s not much room for hopes for an afterlife now.”

“Why’s that?”

“I suppose all of the people brought back with the gauntlet changed my mind.”

“You believed Suzie’s ‘there’s something moving in the darkness’ story, then?”

“We’ve got no other evidence,” Ianto said. “I suppose I’ll learn when I snuff it, eh?”

That was evidently the wrong thing to say, because Jack made a strangled, garbled noise in the back of his throat and pulled Ianto to him. That was that on the subject of religion (and subsequently, death and the afterlife) for a while.

It came up again, months later, after what Ianto thought to be the cruelest night in the universe.

Everything that could have been dealt with was dealt with. Gwen had already gone home to Rhys, but Ianto was staying in the Hub for as long as Jack needed him. It was nearly daybreak, and Ianto still had things to do.

He ended up not going home at all, because Gwen came back later to help pack away Owen and Tosh’s things. Ianto had to sign them out. They had a good cry after Tosh’s video, and Ianto felt like his world had shattered, and that was that. Gwen went home again. And Ianto waited for Jack.

Jack eventually managed to utter a broken “go home” to Ianto three hours later. Ianto, who decided he couldn’t bear being in the Hub any longer, reluctantly relented.

He managed to stay around long enough to watch Jack himself turn in for the time being. Ianto saw him go in his office, heard him go down into his bunker, and Ianto started to leave. A few steps from the cog door, Ianto stopped short as a quick shout emanated from Jack’s office. Jack emerged moments later, eyes wide and breathing deeply. Ianto didn’t think his heart could break anymore than it was already broken, but one look at Jack told him he was wrong. He made his way back to Jack, gently took his arm, and brought him home.

For the first hour of being home, Jack did nothing but stare blankly at whatever was in front of him. Ianto manoeuvred him to the sofa and sat him down, and he stayed there for a while as Ianto assessed the damages to his flat. One of the explosions had gone off nearby. Ianto, reassured that his flat was still intact and unsure of how to deal with an unresponsive Jack, went to take a shower.

He’d just started shampooing his hair when Jack joined him. His eyes weren’t dead anymore, just really sad, and Ianto let Jack wash his hair for him. It wasn’t anything sexual. In fact, that was probably the least sexual shower they’d ever shared. He ended up washing Jack’s hair for him, too.

Jack trailed him around after the shower. If Ianto left for another room, Jack would be by his side in less than ten seconds. It surprised Ianto at first, and then worried him. But when Jack was hovering over his shoulder as he checked his refrigerator for something to eat, it occurred to Ianto that it was just Jack reaffirming to himself that Ianto wasn’t dead, too. And it broke his heart even more.

That night, tangled up in Ianto’s sheets on Ianto’s bed, in the wake of nightmares from both of them, Jack cradled Ianto’s face to his chest. It was particularly uncomfortable, but Ianto said and did nothing, because if it helped Jack, then he’d do it.

“Do you still believe there’s no afterlife?” Jack asked quietly. Ianto heard the tears in his words.

Ianto thought hard about it. When Lisa had… died, Ianto had contemplated it over and over again. Did he really want to believe her soul was stuck in an eternal nothingness, chased forever by something moving in the shadows around her? The answer was no, he didn’t, but that didn’t change the fact that he still did believe it. And it was terrifying and horrible at first to acknowledge that, but he had eventually accepted it.

“Yeah,” Ianto mumbled eventually.

Jack didn’t respond.

“I just hope there’s nothing moving in the darkness anymore,” Ianto continued. “Maybe after it was destroyed by Owen…”

His throat clammed up then, because saying Owen’s name hurt.

“If there’s any sort of god out there, this wouldn’t have happened,” Jack said mutedly.

It clearly was something Ianto wasn’t supposed to respond to, so he just let Jack pull him in tighter to his chest and drifted off to an uncomfortable sleep that way.

Only a month later, Ianto realized Jack wasn’t at all talking about a god at all. He never was.

Ianto informed Gwen about the incoming Daleks, and if he wasn’t afraid before, he sure as hell was now. But he watched Jack bounce around, ready to teleport to his Doctor, and he couldn’t bring up the courage to tell Jack, too. Instead, he responded to Jack’s assurances that he was coming back with a “we’ll be fine” and hoped he wasn’t lying.

The look on Jack’s face as he saw the half-destroyed Dalek corpse Ianto hadn’t gotten around to clean up yet was telling. It was one of the blankest expressions he’d seen on Jack, and Ianto observed him as he took two steps backward, one forward, rocked another step backward again, and then gathered enough strength to walk all the way to the Dalek’s shell to tentatively touch it. He drew his hand back sharply, and whipped his head up to look at Ianto, who quickly looked away and busied himself with clearing up cables.

In the confines of Ianto’s flat, Jack lost it.

Ianto thought Jack’s fuming silence was mostly because of the many, many phone calls with ‘pompous buffoons’ (Jack’s own words) that he’d been forced to endure in past thirteen hours before they were finally able to leave the Hub. That assumption changed as soon as the door slammed closed behind Jack and he let loose. Ianto quickly moved it to the living room, because Jack had the tendency to animatedly throw his hands around as he yelled.

“You could have died!”

“And so could everyone else,” Ianto replied calmly. He was well-versed in this sort of spat.

“But that’s not his place to decide!” Jack spat.

That didn’t follow the usual argument patterns.

Ianto frowned. “What?” 

“You’re not less important than the world!” Jack continued heatedly. “He doesn’t get a say in who lives and who dies. Not with you. Not with Gwen.”

“Sorry, what?” Ianto repeated. He thought this was about purposefully misleading Jack, but apparently, he was wrong.

Jack ignored him. “And then he has the nerve to just… disable my vortex manipulator again! Because _I’m_ going to get in trouble!”

Oh.

“Jack,” Ianto said, gently placing a hand on his arm.

“What?” Jack snapped.

Now, Ianto hadn’t met the Doctor, really. Those few moments on an interstellar Skype didn’t really count, especially since the Doctor didn’t really pay any heed to him. Ianto wasn’t sure he would like to meet him, anyway. Too much bad blood with the whole Canary Warf and runaway Jack ordeals. He wasn’t really the Doctor’s biggest fan.

But Jack?

Jack was so… _devoted_ to the man. Jack had said there was no god big enough for him, but that was probably because his god wasn’t a god, but a person, even if Jack could only remind himself of that when things went wrong. He was the Doctor, who left Jack on the station. The Doctor, who couldn’t save Jack’s team from their fate in the year that wasn’t. The Doctor, who couldn’t fix him. The Doctor, who didn’t stop Jack’s brother from taking his friends away from him. The Doctor, who could have very well led Gwen and Ianto to their deaths.

Ianto knew that sort of loyalty, that sort of hero-worship. He saw it every day, when Gwen looked at Jack like _that._ It wasn’t healthy, but it was faith. Ianto had seen how fervently Jack had called the Doctor; it was more like praying. He saw the way Jack and Martha talked about the Doctor, and he saw how they talked to others about him. How they preached his word. And Torchwood? Torchwood was Jack’s church, created in the name of the benevolent, two-hearted god that Jack saw when he looked at the Doctor.

 “We chose this,” Ianto simply said. “Me and Gwen. We knew what we were signing up for.”

“He shouldn’t have asked for--”

“He didn’t ask,” Ianto reminded him. “That was Harriet Jones who asked us to call him.”

 “He should have picked up,” Jack protested.

“He was stuck,” Ianto said.

“He shouldn’t--”

“Jack.”

Jack looked at Ianto then, so broken and lost, and Ianto pulled him in.

“He’s only a person, Jack,” Ianto murmured, holding Jack close.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. And maybe one day, you will. When I die, or when Gwen dies--” Ianto ignored the sobbing sound Jack made “--you’ll lose everything you have in him. You’ll hate him. You’ll leave Earth, you’ll curse his name and everything he stands for, and you won’t come back. But right now, we don’t have that option.”

Jack tugged out of Ianto’s hold.

“And why not?” he asked challengingly.

“Because when you lose your faith in him, you’ll lose your faith in humanity,” Ianto said sadly. “And I can’t watch that happen.”

That time, it was Jack that enveloped him in a hug.

“I won’t let that happen,” Jack whispered. “I won’t lose faith in humanity. I promise you.”

Ianto settled into the embrace, wishing he could believe that.

**Author's Note:**

> Technically (in the loosest possible sense) this is a songfic. Y'know. The one thing I swore I wouldn't ever write. If anyone can guess what song, I'll love them forever. And I'll love you even more if you know where the title stems from (I'll give you a hint: not a song).  
> Thank you for reading! Have a wonderful day!


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